Cut newly-wed men some slack; they go through hell

I was taken aback recently when I read a feature, obviously by an unmarried man, complaining that newly-wed men misbehave a lot. That they acquire strange habits which they rub on everyone’s faces, that they become in effect little tots used to being followed after.

What is wrong with getting to know and appreciating chamomile tea, even if you never knew such a thing exists six months ago?

What the writer does not know is that marriage greatly contributes to the aloofness on the faces of many newlywed men, if our findings from random interviews in Nairobi are anything to go by.

Dusk was fast approaching when Donald Too and I bumped into each other the other day. The Friday buzz was conspicuous in the flicks of disco lights along Koinange Street. Frenzied paces by pedestrians spoke of exhausted employees; either heading home for the weekend or to a joint for a night of unwinding.

The last time we saw each other was on graduation day in campus. And so, Donald, in a moment of euphoria asked if we could slip into a nearby café for a catch-up over coffee.

“You looked like you were running late somewhere: are you sure about coffee?” I asked, weary of a rushed arrangement.

“Not really,” he said, “I was just heading home... to my wife. But she will have to understand that I was late meeting with a campus buddy.”

And down we went, sipping coffee, gliding over a conversation, ‘how marriage changes prospects for young men’.

“Isn’t it just annoying how women force us to account for every moment we spend away from them?” Donald would say, smirking his lips, responsive to the aroma and taste emanating from his cup.

OBSESSED

A week after tying the knot, Donald was already questioning his prudence in marrying his wife.

“She insists that I consult her before meeting with my friends. She is obsessed about where I am and what I am doing. It is annoying but what do you do; it is not like she put a gun on my head to marry her,” he wondered.

Donald’s wife, a sweetheart from his days in the university, is a dotting wife who cuts the figure of an extremely caring spouse.

“I would love her to care: but in other ways. What she is doing is curtailing my reach,” Donald says.

Donald is only one among many newlywed men who have tales to tell post day one, when they committed – whether willingly or coerced – to a woman in marriage.

Like Donald, Elvis Njenga has seen his ‘identity’ disappear after a few months sharing a house (and everything in it) with a wife.

“Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I can’t identify who I am: I know my name but I just can’t figure out when my house started looking like a botanical sanctuary,” he says.

“There is a flower at every corner of my house. I have never needed those flowers in my life,” he adds. “All I wanted for a place I live in is goof furniture and cleanliness. Not living trees and flowers.”

Elvis’ predicament attracts sympathy only if you haven’t met Joshua Kinyua. Short, stout and with a double chin covering his Adams apple, the reality of married life is just dawning on him.

The past nine months, from the time he got married, Joshua has nary missed a meal. His wife is the sole purveyor of his nutrition – something he deeply regrets today.

“I know I come from a family of big-bodied men but I didn’t plan to be this fat in my twenties. I am really struggling to lose this weight,” he says.

The unspoken rule in Joshua’s home is that a man has to eat his wife’s food – whether he passed by an eatery somewhere or not.

“She will ask that I eat her food to prove that she is still my wife,” a dejected Joshua says of his wife’s fawning habits.

Any resistance to his wife’s demands is met with mutiny – which means days of disquiet in the house followed with catatonic rejection of his overtures at bed time. Afterwards he would have to issue bushels of apologies for life to resume normalcy.

For Ben Lungahi, there is a lot to feel discontented for in marriage. But for now he picks one: one that irks him the most.

“My life is now a cacophony of mundane interactions. I get bored out of my head when my wife invites people at my house. Often, they are people I don’t know and I have very little relationship with. How I wish for weekend nights out with the boys,” he says.

Ben, even after a year, finds it hard to believe that he has to adhere to the ritual of attending church and thereafter meeting with church members every Sunday.

“We have a new-born and if I don’t accompany her to church she will tell on me – to my parents and her parents – of abdicating my fatherly duties,” he says, exasperated.

Last Madaraka Day, Ben recalls, he had planned an afternoon of nyama choma – to be washed down with fantastically brewed beer – much to his wife’s chagrin. Ben can’t recall the exact chronology of events: what he can say, for sure, is that he never left the house. Unknown to him, his wife had already invited her cousins over. The cousins, she told Ben, had always wanted to meet him and it would have been disrespectful to leave them back at the house. “This is not what I signed up for,” Ben protests. “I never wanted to cut links with my friends just because I got married.”

The last time Bernard Omondi negotiated for the type of clothing he wanted to buy was when, just before his admission to the university, he was asked by his father to stick to the budget. “Ever since I have shopped for my needs without consulting anyone,” he says. “It was therefore startling when my wife moved in and began making demands on how we spend the money I make. She should be satisfied with me providing for her basic needs and stop asking me the amount of money I earn and how I am planning to use it.”

Didn’t it occur to Bernard that he was entwined by a social cord that asks for accountability to his spouse?

“I wish someone had told me that before. In my mind we needed to share a bed, meals, and other things in the house: not the money I make, that should not concern her as long as she is well-fed. Surely, there must be a line that separates what is to be shared or otherwise,” he says.

It is not lost to him how much his monthly budget has shot up with things like cooking oil, maize flour, rice and sugar coming in at three times what he used to spend. He shudders at the thought of what will happen when children come into the picture.

Enter Johnny Mazembe, known to his circle of friends as ‘Mswati’. There is not any euphemism that can give him a decent moniker. But that is because Johny, a self-styled honcho, can only afford morals of a stoat on heat and the maturity of a puppy.

“How he ended up marrying such a beautiful girl beats logic,” observes a close confidant of his.

Johnny’s marriage was the culmination to months of high octane trysts with a beautiful young high school leaver who ended up pregnant with his baby.

“The girl’s father asked me to own up and marry her,” Johny says, feeling trapped and unable to run about chasing after other young girls.

When the girl moved in Johnny’s zest for life moved out. He says: “Sex is no longer exciting with her in the house. I loved the thrill of sneaking around. And now that she is in the house I don’t like it anymore.”

All he is wishing for is the freedom he had before the confinement marriage trapped him in. “I want to experience life more. I feel like I skipped that part of life. I should be chasing girls now. Instead I have one tethered in the house,” he laments.

At the café, when we shake hands for goodbye with Donald, his face searches for answers in the lit atmosphere, because in the next few minutes he will be home to a barrage of questions – why he didn’t come home early according to plan and why he didn’t pick calls.

“I call it home policing,” he jokes. Something about it however says that he has had enough of his wife’s incessant nagging.